Wild thoughts from wild.., p.27
Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, page 27
The banquet is not past or future; the banquet is now.
Photographs are taken. Food is eaten. Several short gentle speeches are made, and a son-in-law reads a warm comical poem. A few favorite anecdotes are brought out and polished again, for the zillionth time, like the family silver. Thanks are offered skyward. Finally the daughters and son set out the big gift-wrapped box. The joke that they’ve played on themselves can now be extended to their parents.
The small red-haired woman unwraps it. She lifts out the second clock, the one without chimes, the one with the twirling crystal pendulum. Einstein himself said that two clocks are better than one. She hoots. Then she tilts her head back and laughs, bravely, unregrettingly, joyfully, in the face of time.
Strawberries Under Ice
1. The Gradient of Net Mass Balance
Antarctica is a gently domed continent squashed flat, like a dent in the roof of a Chevy, by the weight of its ice. That burden of ice amounts to seven million cubic miles. Melt it away and the Antarctic interior would bounce upward; Earth itself would change shape. This grand cold fact has, to me, on the tiny and personal scale, a warm appeal. Take away ice and the topography of my own life changes drastically too.
Ice is lighter than water but still heavy. The stuff answers gravity. Ice is a solid but not an absolute solid. The stuff flows. Slowly but inexorably it runs downhill. We think of iciness as a synonym for cold, but cold is relative and ice happens to function well as insulation against heat loss: low thermal conductivity. Also it releases heat to immediate surroundings in the final stage of becoming frozen itself. Ice warms. On a certain night, roughly thirteen years ago, it warmed me.
When a tongue of ice flows down a mountain valley, we call it a glacier. When it flows out in all directions from a source point at high elevation, like pancake batter poured on a griddle, we call it a sheet. Out at the Antarctic circumference are glaciers and seaborne shelves, from which icebergs calve off under their own weight. Both sheets and glaciers are supplied with their substance, their impetus, their ice, by snow and other forms of precipitation back uphill at the source. While old ice is continually lost by calving and melting in the lowlands, new ice is deposited in the highlands, and any glacier or sheet receiving more new ice than it loses old, through the course of a year, is a glacier or sheet that is growing. The scientists would say that its net mass balance is positive.
The Antarctic sheet, for instance, has a positive balance. But this is not an essay about Antarctica.
Each point on a great ice body has its own numerical value for mass balance. Is the ice right here thicker or thinner than last year? Is the glacier, at this spot, thriving or dying? The collective profile of all those individual soundings—more ice or less? thriving or dying?—is called the gradient of net mass balance. This gradient tells, in broad perspective, what has been lost and what has been gained. On that certain night, thirteen years ago, I happened to be asking myself exactly the same question: What’s been lost and what, if anything, gained? Because snow gathers most heavily in frigid sky-scraping highlands, the gradient of net mass balance correlates steeply with altitude. Robust glaciers come snaking down out of the Alaskan mountains. Also because snow gathers most heavily in frigid sky-scraping highlands, I had taken myself on that day to a drifted-over pass in the Bitterroot Mountains, all hell-and-gone up on the state border just west of the town of Tarkio, Montana, and started skiing uphill from there.
I needed as much snow as possible. I carried food and a goose-down sleeping bag and a small shovel. The night in question was December 31, 1975.
I hadn’t come to measure depths or to calculate gradients. I had come to insert myself into a cold white hole. First, of course, I had to dig it. This elaborately uncomfortable enterprise seems to have been part of a long foggy process of escape and purgation, much of which you can be spared. Suffice to say that my snow cave, to be dug on New Year’s Eve into a ten-foot-high cornice on the leeward side of the highest ridge I could ski to, and barely large enough for one person, would be at the aphelion of that long foggy process. At the perihelion was Oxford University.
At Oxford University during one week in late springtime there is a festival of crew races on the river, featuring girls in long dresses, boys in straw hats, an abundance of champagne and strawberries. This event is called Eights Week, for the fact of eight men to a crew. It is innocent. More precisely: It is no more obnoxious, no more steeped in snobbery and dandified xenophobia and intellectual and social complacence than any other aspect of Oxford University. The strawberries are served under heavy cream. Sybaritism is mandatory. For these and other reasons, partly personal, partly political, I had fled the place screaming during Eights Week of 1972, almost exactly coincident (by no coincidence) with Richard Nixon’s announcement of the blockade of Haiphong harbor. Nixon’s blockade and Oxford’s strawberries had nothing logically in common, but they converged to produce in me a drastic reaction to what until then had been just a festering distemper.
It took me another year to arrive in Montana. I had never before set foot in the state. I knew no one there. But I had heard that it was a place where, in the early weeks of September, a person could look up to a looming horizon and see fresh-fallen snow. I had noted certain blue lines on a highway map, knew the lines to be rivers, and imagined those rivers to be dark mountain streams flashing with trout. I arrived during the early weeks of September and lo it was all true.
I took a room in an old-fashioned boardinghouse. I looked for a job. I started work on a recklessly ambitious and doomed novel. I sensed rather soon that I hadn’t come to this place temporarily. I began reading the writers—Herodotus, Euripides, Coleridge, Descartes, Rousseau, Thoreau, Raymond Chandler—for whom a conscientious and narrow academic education had left no time. I spent my nest egg and then sold my Volkswagen bus for another. I learned the clownish mortification of addressing strangers with: “Hi, my name is Invisible and I’ll be your waiter tonight.” I was twenty-six, just old enough to realize that this period was not some sort of prelude to my life but the thing itself. I knew I was spending real currency, hard and finite, on a speculative venture at an unknowable rate of return: the currency of time, energy, stamina. Two more years passed before I arrived, sweaty and chilled, at that high cold cornice in the Bitterroots.
By then I had made a small handful of precious friends in this new place, and a menagerie of acquaintances, and I had learned also to say: “You want that on the rocks or up?” Time was still plentiful but stamina was low. Around Christmas that year, two of the precious friends announced a New Year’s Eve party. Tempting, yet it seemed somehow a better idea to spend the occasion alone in a snow cave.
So here I was. There had been no trail up the face of the ridge and lifting my legs through the heavy snow had drenched and exhausted me. My thighs felt as though the Chicago police had worked on them with truncheons. I dug my hole. That done, I changed out of the soaked, freezing clothes. I boiled and ate some noodles, drank some cocoa; if I had been smart enough to encumber my pack with a bottle of wine, I don’t remember it. When dark came I felt the nervous exhilaration of utter solitude and, behind that like a metallic aftertaste, loneliness. I gnawed on my thoughts for an hour or two, then retired. The night turned into a clear one and when I crawled out of the cave at 3:00 A.M. of the new year, to empty my bladder, I found the sky rolled out in a stunning pageant of scope and dispassion and cold grace.
It was too good to waste. I went back into the cave for my glasses.
The temperature by now had gone into the teens below zero. I stood there beside the cornice in cotton sweatpants, gaping up. “We never know what we have lost, or what we have found,” says America’s wisest poet, Robert Penn Warren, in the context of a meditation about John James Audubon and the transforming power of landscape. We never know what we have lost, or what we have found. All I did know was that the highway maps called it Montana, and that I was here, and that in the course of a life a person could travel widely but could truly open his veins and his soul to just a limited number of places.
After half an hour I crawled back into the cave, where ten feet of snow and a rime of ice would keep me warm.
2. Ablation
Trace any glacier or ice sheet downhill from its source and eventually you will come to a boundary where the mass balance of ice is zero. Nothing is lost, over the course of time, and nothing is gained. The ice itself constantly flows past this boundary, molecule by molecule, but if any new ice is added here by precipitation, if any old ice is taken away by melting, those additions and subtractions cancel each other exactly. This boundary is called the equilibrium line. Like other forms of equilibrium, it entails a cold imperturbability, a sublime steadiness relative to what’s going on all around. Above the equilibrium line is the zone of accumulation. Below is the zone of ablation.
Ablation is the scientists’ fancy word for loss. Down here the mass balance is negative. Ice is supplied to this zone mainly by flow from above, little or not at all by direct precipitation, and whatever does come as direct precipitation is less than the amount annually lost. The loss results from several different processes: wind erosion, surface melting, evaporation (ice does evaporate), underside melting of an ice shelf where it rests on the warmer sea water. Calving off of icebergs. Calving is the scientists’ quaint word for that sort of event when a great hunk of ice—as big as a house or, in some cases, as big as a county—tears away from the leading edge of the sheet or the glacier and falls thunderously into the sea.
Possibly this talk about calving reflects an unspoken sense that the larger ice mass, moving, pulsing, constantly changing its shape, is almost alive. If so, the analogy doesn’t go far. Icebergs don’t suckle or grow. They float away on the sea, melt, break apart, disappear. Wind erosion and evaporation and most of those other ablative processes work on the ice slowly, incrementally. Calving on the other hand is abrupt. A large piece of the whole is there, and then gone.
The occurrence of a calving event depends on a number of factors—flow rate of the whole ice body, thickness at the edge, temperature, fissures in the ice, stresses from gravity or tides—one of which is the strength of the ice itself. That factor, strength, is hard to measure. You might never know until too late. Certain experiments done on strength-testing machines have yielded certain numbers: a strength of thirty-eight bars (a bar is a unit of pressure equal to 100,000 newtons per square meter) for crushing; fourteen bars for bending; nine bars for tensile. But those numbers offer no absolute guide to the performance of different types of ice under different conditions. They only suggest in a relative way that, though ice may flow majestically under its own weight, though it may stretch like caramel, though it may bend like lead, it gives back rock-like resistance to a force coming down on it suddenly. None of this cold information was available to me on the day now in mind, and if it had been I wouldn’t have wanted it.
On the day now in mind I had been off skiing, again, with no thought for the physical properties of ice, other than maybe some vague awareness of the knee strain involved in carving a turn across boilerplate. I came home to find a note in my door.
The note said that a young woman I knew, the great love of a friend of mine, was dead. The note didn’t say what had happened. I should call a number in Helena for details. It was not only shocking but ominous. Because I knew that the young woman had lately been working through some uneasy and confusing times, I thought of all the various grim possibilities involving despair. Then I called the Helena number, where a houseful of friends were gathered for communal grieving and food and loud music. I learned that the young woman had died from a fall. A freak accident. In the coldest sense of cold consolation, there was in this information some relief.
She had slipped on a patch of sidewalk ice, the night before, and hit her head. A nasty blow, a moment or two of unconsciousness, but she had apparently been all right. She went home alone and was not all right and died before morning. I suppose she was about twenty-seven. This is exactly why head-trauma cases are normally put under close overnight observation, but I wasn’t aware of that at the time, and neither evidently were the folks who had helped her up off that icy sidewalk. She had seemed okay. Even after the fall, her death was preventable. Of course most of us will die preventable deaths; hers was only more vividly so, and earlier.
I had known her, not well, through her sweetheart and the network of friends now assembled in that house in Helena. These friends of hers and mine were mostly a group of ecologists who had worked together, during graduate school, as waiters and bartenders and cooks; I met them in that context and they had nurtured my sanity to no small degree when that context began straining it. They read books, they talked about ideas, they knew a spruce from a hemlock, they slept in snow caves: a balm of good company to me. They made the state of Montana into a place that was not only cold, true, hard, and beautiful, but damn near humanly habitable. The young woman, now dead, was not herself a scientist, but she was one of them in all other senses. She came from a town up on the Hi-Line.
I had worked with her too, and seen her enliven long afternoons that could otherwise be just a tedious and not very lucrative form of self-demeanment. She was one of those rowdy, robust people—robust in good times, just as robust when she was angry or miserable—who are especially hard to imagine dead. She was a rascal of wit. She could be wonderfully crude. We all knew her by her last name, because her first seemed too ladylike and demure. After the phone call to Helena, it took me a long time to make the mental adjustment of tenses. She had been a rascal of wit.
The memorial service was scheduled for such-and-such day, in that town up on the Hi-Line.
We drove up together on winter roads, myself and two of the Helena friends, a husband-and-wife pair of plant ecologists. Others had gone ahead. Places available for sleeping, spare rooms and floors; make contact by phone; meet at the church. We met at the church and sat lumpish while a local pastor discoursed with transcendent irrelevance about what we could hardly recognize as her life and death. It wasn’t his fault, he didn’t know her. There was a reception with the family, followed by a postwake on our own at a local bar, a fervent gathering of young survivors determined not only to cling to her memory but to cling to one another more appreciatively now that such a persuasive warning bell of mortality had been rung, and then sometime after dark as the wind came up and the temperature dropped away as though nothing was under it and a new storm raked in across those wheatlands, the three of us started driving back south. It had been my first trip to the Hi-Line.
Aside from the note in the door, this is the part I remember most clearly. The car’s defroster wasn’t working. I had about four inches of open windshield. It was a little Honda that responded to wind like a shuttlecock, and on slick pavement the rear end flapped like the tail of a trout. We seemed to be rolling down a long dark tube coated inside with ice, jarred back and forth by the crosswinds, nothing else visible except the short tongue of road ahead and the streaming snow and the trucks blasting by too close in the other lane. How ironic, I thought, if we die on the highway while returning from a funeral. I hunched over the wheel, squinting out through that gap of windshield, until some of the muscles in my right shoulder and neck shortened themselves into a knot. The two plant ecologists kept me awake with talk. One of them, from the backseat, worked at the knot in my neck. We talked about friendship and the message of death as we all three felt we had heard it, which was to cherish the living, while you have them. Seize, hold, appreciate. Pure friendship, uncomplicated by romance or blood, is one of the most nurturing human relationships and one of the most easily taken for granted. This was our consensus, spoken and unspoken.
These two plant ecologists had been my dear friends for a few years, but we were never closer than during that drive. Well after midnight, we reached their house in Helena. I slept on sofa cushions. In the morning they got me to a doctor for the paralytic clench in my neck. That was almost ten years ago and I’ve hardly seen them since.
The fault is mine, or the fault is nobody’s. We got older and busier and trails diverged. They began raising children. I traveled to Helena less and less. Mortgages, serious jobs, deadlines; and the age of sleeping on sofa cushions seemed to have passed. I moved, they moved, opening more geographical distance. Montana is a big place and the roads are often bad. These facts offered in explanation sound even to me like excuses. The ashes of the young woman who slipped on the ice have long since been sprinkled onto a mountaintop or into a river, I’m not sure which. Nothing to be done now either for her or about her. The two plant ecologists I still cherish, in intention anyway, at a regrettable distance, as I do a small handful of other precious friends who seem to have disappeared from my life by wind erosion or melting.
3. Leontiev’s Axiom
The ice mass of a mountain glacier flows down its valley in much the same complicated pattern as a river flowing in its bed. Obviously the glacier is much slower. Glacial ice may move at rates between six inches and six feet per day; river water may move a distance in that range every second. Like the water of a river, though, the ice of a glacier does not all flow at the same rate. There are eddies and tongues and slack zones, currents and swells, differential vectors of mix and surge. The details of the flow pattern depend on variable parameters special to each case: depth of the ice, slope, contour of the bed, temperature. But some generalizations can be made. Like a river, a glacier will tend to register faster flow rates at the surface than at depths, faster flows at midchannel than along the edges, and faster flows down in the middle reaches than up near the source. One formula scientists use to describe the relations between flow rate and those other factors is:
u = k1sin3 a h4 + k2 sin2 a h2.
